Amazon and Brands: Conflict and Resolution

Amazon is Not for Brand Building, But It Can Be!

Typically you do not sell on Amazon in order to build your brand. As we’ve covered before, Amazon users are looking for specifics. If someone is looking for shoes, they more than likely know the brand and size they want, they just want to see the lowest price. If you are not the brand that they are looking for, you are not the product they will buy – most of the time. This means that selling on Amazon with the idea that you are going to build brand recognition is already a uphill battle. That being said, building a brand on Amazon can be done!

Brands are Dead! Long Live Brands!

Can you think of the last time you bought a product on Amazon that was not based on previous purchases of that same product or household name brand recognition? Let’s use laundry soap as an example. If you’ve bought laundry soap on Amazon, did you search for a brand you were already familiar with, or did you just type laundry soap into the search bar?

If you typed laundry soap into the search bar, do you remember the brand you bought, or were you simply concerned with the cost per ounce or cost per load? Chances are pretty good that the brand was not the thing that caught your eye. This is one way that Amazon is very different from a physical store: you have a nearly unlimited amount of options as well as ratings and reviews from real humans at your fingertips, which can negate flashy labelling or other marketing efforts of larger brands. Would you buy a blank box with laundry powder that has 1,200, 5 star reviews and costs less than a jug of Tide that has 1,200, 4 star reviews? Amazon and data would say yes, you would.

In a sense, Amazon is bringing about a new era in brands, some might argue that Amazon is killing brands based on data that supports the above example. But not all is lost!

Building a Brand on Amazon

One of the easiest ways outside of Amazon to build a brand is by having a famous person endorse your product in some way. Unfortunately, using Amazon to build your brand is a long game that has to be approached from every angle. The main ways to start building your brand recognition on Amazon are:

Headline ads

5 star reviews

The Amazon’s Choice badge

First and foremost, a trademark and Brand Registry are the most basic steps to building your brand on Amazon. Brand Registry allows you access to Enhanced Brand Content and headline ads among other things.

Headline Ads

Headline Ads appear at the very top of all searches that contain a keyword that you are bidding on and have won. As far as building brand recognition goes, this is the most basic way to start. While impressions for Sponsored Products include impressions that actually never show up in front of someone’s eyes (those ads buried at the bottom of a page), Headline Ad impressions are actual eyeballs on your brand name and products.

Five Star Reviews

Among one of the highest weighted metric signals in the Amazon algorithm are the reviews. Obviously, it is bad for Amazon’s business to sell items that people don’t like, so the more 5 star reviews you can get, the better for your products showing up higher on the first page of search results. Five star reviews also help other users when they are making a decision like the laundry soap decision mentioned above.

Amazon’s Choice

This mysterious little badge is gifted to products that are well priced, available to ship immediately, and available on Prime. Amazon used this badge starting in 2015 to help voice search shopping, but it turns out that it is a pretty valuable badge to earn to increase sales as it stands out from the Best Seller badge that can show up 5 times on a page.